Office Hours: Halima Haruna

“Pension Claims to Networks: Logics of African American Women’s Community Making at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”

The turn of the twentieth century had been described as the “nadir” of American race relations and as the “woman’s era.” African American women applied for federal pension claims during this period within a “grassroots pension network” as Brandi C. Brimmer writes in Claiming Union Widowhood (2020). My project aims to visualize the networks that validated African American women’s social status within the state using federal pension claims and network analysis software. Methodologically, I will argue that using network analysis tools allows for an additional reading of large datasets, revealing the clusters of relationships in the counties. My paper will culminate in a walkthrough of the interactive versions of the networks.

The project is triggered by historical scholarship on Civil War pension claims and the emerging welfare state such as Administering Freedom by Dale Kretz. The project is also in conversation with digital history projects such as the Mapping Marronage network project, an visualization of the trans-Atlantic networks created by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th century.

Attendees will be introduced to the project as a use case of network analysis platforms for historical analysis and engagement with archival materials. My paper will also introduce some potential strategies for infusing data collection and processing with scholarly insights. These strategies will be of interest to digital humanists working with African American history.

Attendee feedback would support my development of additional digital approaches to the analysis of the documents.

A previous version of this paper was posted on the NULab for Digital Humanities & Computational Social Science’s website in May 2025.

Bio: Halima Haruna is a PhD student in World History at Northeastern University. Her research interests are in African American women’s history, intellectual history and digital and public history. Her ongoing dissertation research involves the study of black women’s associational life, and black women’s roles in communities under segregation at the turn of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a project creating Wikipedia articles for prominent but undersung Black women in Boston as a Research Associate at the Boston Research Center.